MUSIC Forty years on
CHARLES REID
me years ago, I went up in a London otel lift face to face with Dimitri Shosta- ovich. I noted the mouth. Timorous? Tena- ous? Hard to say which. The eyes were atchful: and they glittered, though this ay have been a trick of light on his spec- des. I "tried to read into Shostakovich's ace what Shostakovich had been through. e face refused to tell.
All this recurred to me during last week's pate of Russian music at the Royal Festival all. With the London Philharmonic rchestra (plus the LP Choir for Prokoviev's lexander Nevsky cantata), Eugene Svet- nov, chief conductor of the Soviet State Ymphony Orchestra (and no newcomer ere), gave three programmes which, to my nd, were dominated by Shostakovich's iolin Concerto No I. Between Mr Svet- nov's second and third concerts, Colin vis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra put n the first performance in this country of ostakovich's Symphony No 2. For this we ad. waited over forty years. The reason why simple.
From the mid-1920s onward the Moscow usical 'apparat' self-righteously proscribed Whole sequence of Shostakovich pieces on eological grounds. The Second Symphony as one of them. At last it has crept out from under the tombstone. Not that the death certificate is formally expunged. It survives, ironically enough, in an official prefatory note to the full score of the First Violin Con- certo (Soviet State edition, Moscow, 1957), the very score which Mr Svetlanov had on
his RFH desk the night before Mr Davis's concert. Shostakovich's music, or some of
it, says the note, is often 'self-contradictory in its nature', marred by 'modernistic influences' and 'mistakes', by 'formalism and experimentation'. Witness the Second Sym- phony and the Third. (To these might have been added the Fourth which, composed in 1935, was not 'released' until 1961.) Any symphony which incurs ideological jargon of this sort is obviously to be taken seriously and hopefully. Undoubtedly Shosta- kovich's No 2 has power. That power stems from the opening Largo. Over a soft bass- drum roll, the strings do a complex, shadowy uperawl, layer upon layer of them. To the slow stalk of double-basses upper lines are added, each busier and in smaller note-values than the last, until we are mazed about by muted polyphonies which, although inter- preted by some as depicting chaos, are a prodigy of sustained design. The sections that follow the Largo reflect, as to tempo and mood, the traditional symphonic divisions, although No 2 is actually in one movement, and shortish at that. There are jaunts and gruffnesses in dotted-note rhythms, magni- ficently brassy counterpoints and slim, melancholy patterings for solo violin, clarinet and bassoon. We end with a four-part mixed choir singing (or, for a couple of bars, shout- ing) dismal lines (author: A. Bezimensky) about October, the Commune and Lenin to strains that smack of every standard Russian composer from Glinka through Moussorgsky to Glazounov.
The conformism of the text and (at this point) the musical style are significant. The symphony was state commissioned. Its dedi- cation is to the October Revolution. That the 'apparat' should have damned it as his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been damned must have greatly shaken Shosta- kovich. He had done his best to toe the jargoneers' line after all, and the sym- phony's last section falls far below the glooms and whispers and interweavings that begin it. Yet the score as a whole is so striking that I am now immersed in a recording of it put out by RCA-Victor label, with Shosta- kovich's No 3 on the reverse side: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mor- ton Gould. Shostakovich is the last com- poser on earth whom I expect to turn out an unbroken line of entire and perfect chrysolites. The First Violin Concerto is among works that have had the 'apparat's' laying-on of hands; and they aren't the only ones to place it high.
But when I say that the concerto domi- nated Mr Svetlanov's three concerts—it had to compete with a superb account of the Moussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition and a finely-paced, finely articulated Rach- maninov Piano Concerto No 1 (soloist Mal- colm Binns)—what I have in mind particu- larly, if not solely, is the Passacaglia, that gentle cenotaph of a movement. Here again, the chosen pace gave the music scope and stature. Not only was the movement elo- quently schemed. It also had a sensuous quality. Miss Haendel's solo tone was all silk and fire and steel. For this kernel and treasure it was well worth while sitting through the forlornness, freak scoring and facetiae which, as I hear them, mar the movements that go before or come after.
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